Whispering_Jack

You know by saying that, you're only going to get one possible response.

Are you going to the races tomorrow Redleg? I know you've been looking forward to it.

Admittedly, Aish would be a very outside chance to be available but it might very well depend on who St. Kilda goes for at 3. If the Saints take Billings which is possible, then the following clubs might look at other more preferred players next allowing someone like Aish to slip. Very unlikely but whichever way it falls, we should have a good choice of quality players.

A pity our own AFL doesn't take an example from the NFL which has given SF and Jax the bye after last week's game in London. The bye would come in handy for Melbourne after one of those energy sapping trips to Darwin.

I think it's time for the selectors to show a bit of imagination and give Doolan his chance but somehow, I think they'll remain true to form and go conservative for the first test.

If there are 18 in the field I'm tipping it to come 17th.

You forgot to remind me about the banana fritters.

Oh well, I think I must have offended our friend the big frog. This thread is such a cut throat business. Redleg. I think we're off to Chinese for dinner tonight. Remind me to order banana fritters for desert.

It's after midnight now but what happened to the pictures?

Is the horse not embarrassed to appear in public?

Someone named a horse after a sex offender?

Sorry. Missed it among the picture gallery that seems to have taken over this thread.

I agree and, in time, they will complement the inclusion of Shannon Byrnes from last year.BTW. How many days to the draft?

I'm truly disappointed in you lot. Last year someone came on every day with the countdown to draft day but this year, there's simply too much nonsense. It's time to get back to basics, discussion about the price of bananas and the fact that there are 21 days to go till draft day.

Cross cannot be officially listed until 1 November when the delisted free agency period starts.At that time we will have three primary list vacancies and four rookie list vacancies.

Thanks for that Macca. I also discovered after the event that the post match function was at the hotel directly opposite where we were staying and the keynote speaker was former champion SF QB Joe Montana. There's a big move to have a franchise either established in or moved to London. Problem is that the sporting media here is saturated with soccer followed by the rugby codes. NFL managed a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper I read here. In any event, I missed Joe and then I missed the storm that went through southern England last night. Slept through the latter and didn't know about the former until it was way too late. Forty niners are meanwhile in the middle of a five game winning streak. I wonder how long before I'm able to say that about the Demons?

By sheer coincidence, I'm in London at the moment and so are the San Francisco 49ers. I didn't get to see the game but was wondering why there were so many fans with their uniforms and caps wandering around Piccadilly. The closest I got to the game was when we drove past Wembley Stadium on the way to dinner with my London cousins. Only discovered afterwards that we won comfortably. Did the televise the game on Foxtel?

How can you discuss something as mundane as draft picks when you're in the entertainment capital of the world, London? How was Willy Wonka?

At the risk of derailing this thread I would like to congratulate the Redleg family on the marriage of Olivia and Scoop Junior. It was a wonderful wedding ceremony although Redleg omitted to mention bananas once in his very brief speech.

What did she look like 49 years ago?I could have met her at Festival Hall. I had a Beatle haircut and looked a bit like Paul McCartney ... or was it Ringo Starr?

Beatle: beat-lnoun 1. any of numerous insects of the order Coleoptera, characterized by hard, horny forewings that cover and protect the membranous flight wings. 2. (loosely) a performing insect that is capable of kicking accurately with each of its six feet verb (used without object) 1. to move quickly; scurry: He beatled off to catch the train

Last night we ran into a couple of characters who resembled the two in the photographs immediately above. We were at The Cavern Club which is directly over the road from Liverpool's original Cavern Club where the Beatles rose to fame in the 1960s. It's a dingy underground club area with an atmosphere pungent with beer smells and literally hundreds of mad fans going off their heads over the songs sung by a Beatles cover band that sounds remarkably like the original which I saw at Festival Hall on 15 June 1964. Let's not forget what happened a little more than three months after that.

Yesterday Redleg hosted a visit to the Beatles Museum and Magical Mystery Bus Tour of Liverpool to locations of note in the history of the Fab Four. The bus guide was a bloke called Jay Johnson, brother of Holly Johnson of the controversial 1980s Liverpudlian group Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I must confess that while I was swept up by the Beatlemania phenomenon in the 1960s, the main focus of my musical tastes remained elsewhere (see avatar) but I still got a lot from the tour. Also, having studied the economic history of the region, I expected all northern England towns to be highly industrialised and ugly. Not so Liverpool. We visited some of the older areas of the city, but on the whole, I found it quite beautiful with lots of green areas (but no banana plantations in this neck of the world), interesting historic and modern buildings and friendly people. Sadly, very few people with who to discuss Melbourne's recruiting developments (Redleg's otherwise heavily distracted at the moment by the forthcoming nuptials) although one of the guests is a Collingwood supporter who's working in London with the groom. This year's events and the loss of Daisy and Heater seem to have knocked the stuffing out of such supporters. The old arrogance is disappearing. It appears that Melbourne's recruiting output in our absence has stalled. This needs to be fixed up to help with our breakfast conversations at the hotel. The Americans here who do nothing but drone on about how the shutdown and debt ceiling issues are afflicting their country at the moment are amazed when I tell them that my football club back in Australia has been in that condition for seven years.

Don't worry about him. He once aspired to be a great method actor and even got a role as a river person on a movie called "Deliverance". Last role he ever got but still lives it every day.Meanwhile in Liverpool, I've made another startling discovery. Nobody here has a Beatles haircut.

And it's a very good morning from Liverpool, England and I have some sensational news for followers of this thread. We now have our own poet laureate in the form of one of the great female voices in contemporary Japanese literature, Tokyo's own (and now our own as well) Banana Yoshimoto . The author of a dozen novels including Kitchen and her latest, The Lake was featured in the British Airways in flight magazine which I read on the way from London Heathrow to Manchester last night. The sun's about to rise in Liverpool, the place we're staying at is right on the Mersey River overlooking the port. Can't think of a better spot to discuss Japanese literature and the fascinating developments of Melbourne's trade week over breakfast with Redleg.